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Julie Edwards: Keep on coming in getting comfortable, saying, Hi! We are right at the top of the hour, so we'll go ahead and formally start this webinar. I'm Julie Edwards. I want to welcome you to this webinar building critical thinking across the disciplines.
Julie Edwards: So I'm a librarian and instructional designer with Niche Academy, and I'd love to take a minute to just introduce you to Niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning management system to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measure success.
Julie Edwards: Our software is the perfect tool. If you're looking to increase your E resour usage, deliver information, literacy, instruction and measure student success and provide training for patrons and staff, including your student employees.
Julie Edwards: If you're interested in finding out more about our platform chatting with a member of our team or hearing what your colleagues at other libraries have to say. I'll drop a link to our website in the chat so that you can check us out.
Julie Edwards: We are recording this webinar and I will make the recording, the slides, the chat, and the audio transcripts available to everyone after the presentation. That will all be posted on our blog. And you'll get an email from me in a few days with a link to all of that
Julie Edwards: you can on you can turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen by clicking the live transcript button. If you would like to use that. Please continue to chat with each other, share ideas, go back and forth, but if you have a question for the presenter, please put that in the question and answer box. It's not unusual for me to miss questions that pop up in the chat, so if you put them in the QA. I'll do my best to moderate those at the end of the presentation.
Julie Edwards: This Webinar series is part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together. I'm really delighted to see so many of you here today. I will post a link to our blog which has our upcoming webinars, including webinars, specifically for academic librarians. I'll drop that in the chat.
Julie Edwards: So without further ado, our presenter today is Jeremy Stater. Jeremy has an undergraduate degree in cognitive science from Carnegie Mellon University and a master's in clinical and creative thinking from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he's also pursuing a Ph. D. In global inclusion and social development.
Julie Edwards: He serves as the assistant director and member of the faculty of the graduate program in critical and creative thinking. At Umass, Boston.
Julie Edwards: His work centers on interdisciplinary approaches to adult and community education, and his research interests draw upon social change, pedagogy, collaboration, instructional design, and participatory theatre. I am delighted to have him with us today, and I will turn the webinar over to Jeremy.
Jeremy Szteiter: Great. Thank you very much, Julie. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today and for thank you to Nisha Academy for allowing me to be part of this session as well as Julie mentioned. I'm Jeremy Stator. I'll be talking with you today about building critical thinking across the disciplines. And, as Julie mentioned, I'm the coordinator and faculty in a graduate program at University of Massachusetts, in Boston called critical and creative thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: Just a bit more about where I'm coming from. So I've been with this program for about 15 years before that, I've mainly worked as an educator in some capacity, often with adults and community and higher education settings, including working as an instructional designer program manager and instructor roles and also some working community based human services, education centers working with both adults and young people.
Jeremy Szteiter: So in my current role, I teach courses in critical thinking. And also I spend a lot of time teaching courses in Pre are pre capstone research courses for our graduate students who are trying to do a lot of work to develop and clarify ideas that they're going to be building into their future research and projects.
Jeremy Szteiter: I also actually started my career as a excuse me as a computer programmer where I developed websites and also for a little while I worked as a trainer and a consultant for a company that developed artificial intelligence applications for large scale industrial settings. So while my presentation today doesn't really address artificial intelligence and large language models per se.
Jeremy Szteiter: that we've been hearing a a lot about. I do keep that concept in mind and thinking about how we can teach people to deal with information in the different different forms that it's coming in to us from in our highly highly digitized world and trying to think beyond.
Jeremy Szteiter: How do I? How do we identify sources of information, motivations of the sources and so on.
Jeremy Szteiter: I wanted to add a few other things as background. Just help give some context about what I mean when I use the term critical thinking here and where I'm coming from.
Jeremy Szteiter: Since that concept tends to be understood in different ways.
Jeremy Szteiter: So when that phrase gets used, I think there's a general sense that people probably understand what we mean to each other when we're talking in a given situation. But I think the concept also tends to relate multiple ideas together, multiple frameworks or possibilities as as we try to. Consider the the practical applications of critical thinking. So
Jeremy Szteiter: I mentioned my work with this gradual program in critical and creative thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: The program began in 1979, when there was a lot of emphasis being placed on especially critical thinking how to integrate it into classrooms.
Jeremy Szteiter: and in the sense of teaching students to use good reasoning.
Jeremy Szteiter: excuse me. But in the many years since then the program and the students really address critical and creative thinking to across the fields. So the students are coming at this concept for many different disciplinary interests and backgrounds.
Jeremy Szteiter: the work experience that they've had is usually pretty varied.
Jeremy Szteiter: Many of them, of course, are educators or librarians, or work in other kinds of educational fields, but they also work from
Jeremy Szteiter: organization, leadership, business student support work artists and scientists, and many, many others as well.
So students in the program are looking to develop their own critical and creative thinking with respect to
Jeremy Szteiter: how it applies to their discipline. and then, especially as graduate students, they have experience. They have professional environments that
Jeremy Szteiter: I need maybe boosts of critical thinking according to to their way of thinking about it. So we try to to bring those ideas together as we help students to really build their own models and concepts of what critical thinking is
Jeremy Szteiter: to them and in their, in their context.
Jeremy Szteiter: but grounded in really, in the work, in the field that they're doing
Jeremy Szteiter: alright. So when we think about critical thinking across the disciplines in our sense. Here we're referring to the way that tools of critical thinking specifically can be helpful in approaching academic and scholarly work when you go through the information gathering and the sense making that tends to be needed across different subject matter.
Jeremy Szteiter: So here we're really thinking about critical thinking as part of how we engage with content.
And there are a few other points about that I wanted to make as well.
Jeremy Szteiter: One is that the meaning of the concept of critical thinking is not something that I tend to treat dogmatically as if there's a single best definition or framework or model for how to do it.
Jeremy Szteiter: across the various definitions and and perspectives. I think there are a lot of shared themes which help us to understand each other as we discuss this topic, but we might start to find some interesting differences as well when we start talking about what it means to to practice critical thinking or foster it in in our real life environments.
Jeremy Szteiter: And there are various broad categories of approaches to the development of critical thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: So one tends to be focused on teaching people to become more skilled in argumentation and formal reasoning. So
Jeremy Szteiter: by helping people understand more abstractly the rules of logic, for example, and how fallacies work and applying them in largely in written in or in spoken form.
Jeremy Szteiter: That's that's one broad approach that some programs or perspectives. Take
Jeremy Szteiter: another is to support people, to develop a range of skills and thinking dispositions
Jeremy Szteiter: that they can then apply to their contexts. So the idea here is that by using tools of critical thinking consistently and in your sort of day-to-day work.
Jeremy Szteiter: we can actually gain
Jeremy Szteiter: competency and capacity for those skills that can be applied to learning in situations.
Jeremy Szteiter: and as we practice the skills, we then might also develop and strengthen our dispositions, which are not just about knowing how to use critical thinking approaches, but gaining the sensitivity, and then being inclined to apply them in the right situations.
Jeremy Szteiter: so consequence of that idea is that critical thinking can be taught, and it can be learned. And that's the perspective that I'm taking as well. If you happen to know the names Richard, Paul and Linda Elder. They're known for their work around critical thinking one of the concepts that they've discussed is distinguishing what they call strong sense
Jeremy Szteiter: from weak sense, critical thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: So weak sense means that you're teaching critical thinking skills mainly as neutral skills that can be applied across situations. But their strong sense idea brings us to the idea of the ethical
Jeremy Szteiter: foundations for how we're using our critical thinking as well in terms of bringing our bringing our attention to what we're thinking about. In the first place, what problems we're trying to solve.
Jeremy Szteiter: How do we hold onto our paradigms and change them over time, and how our world views connect us to the awareness of of the world as well. So
Jeremy Szteiter: I mentioned those just to refer to the the vast scope of the way that critical thinking ends up being sort of operationalized and discussed
Jeremy Szteiter: in the broad sense across society.
Jeremy Szteiter: So today, we're mainly staying at the level of smaller structured ways of helping critical thinking be infused into the activities that we do while we're addressing their more specific concerns. How do we make sense of information. How do we engage with meaning from the content that we're encountering? And how do we support others? Our students, for example, to do that as well.
Jeremy Szteiter: So it's one thing to promote better critical thinking, or to point out where it's not happening. But it's really another to work through. How do we actually apply it and create an environment in a culture of critical thinking at the level of day-to-day activity and practice and habit?
Jeremy Szteiter: going to my next slide. Excuse me again.
Jeremy Szteiter: So in considering this idea of the tools or structures of critical thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: we're thinking about the idea that people are capable of critical thinking. So we're making that assumption right away. People are capable. and we might find various ways that they do, or they don't apply critical thinking in
Jeremy Szteiter: certain degrees at certain times. But if we think about how people use use these tools to be more systematic in regarding information, then they might be able to increase their capacity.
Jeremy Szteiter: So in terms of academic work, we think about multiple challenges coming up today. Of course. So first of all, the quantity of information available online in the media.
the growth of published material.
Jeremy Szteiter: peer-reviewed research and otherwise out there. Also, of course, those issues of information.
Jeremy Szteiter: misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and how the information spreads through social media. I noticed that in a recent niche Academy webinar it was focused on information literacy skills and misinformation
Jeremy Szteiter: and research work of Professor Laura Saunders at Simmons University, here in the Boston area. So perhaps our our webinar today might complement some of those ideas brought up. Then, if you were able to attend that session.
Jeremy Szteiter: the
Jeremy Szteiter: another issue is that the social perception and beliefs about the state of critical thinking among the public is something that we're seeing.
Jeremy Szteiter: That we have to deal with. So is critical thinking on the decline in reality, or are people just just not doing it? Do they not know how?
Jeremy Szteiter: Along with the recognition by employers and organization leaders that they want their employees to be good critical thinkers is is a core skill. So we've seen an increase in the mention of critical thinking thinking as one of the requirements of job postings. For example.
Jeremy Szteiter: also, I think another another sort of layer here is that people have beliefs about what critical thinking is, and whether or not they're personally doing it.
Jeremy Szteiter: So some people might say that critical thinking is
Jeremy Szteiter: really about critiquing something or cutting down flawed information. And therefore, as long as you're doing those things you're doing critical thinking. As long as you're calling out all of the the thinking infractions that we can find out there.
Jeremy Szteiter: So there's also this challenge of what we call sophistry. So using the appearance of critical thinking and being analytical while you're actually just in reality twisting things to advance bad arguments or seeking to confuse others, including people who may not be quite as skilled at at verbal argumentation.
Jeremy Szteiter: so I mentioned some of my experiences before, but I've also worked with groups of educators, including teachers, librarians. And I know that many of you are thinking, maybe about the challenges in those contexts in service, of helping young people, maybe navigate that in information that's coming at them
Jeremy Szteiter: from any direction. So
Jeremy Szteiter: on the slide that we see here, I just noted that there's some recent publications.
Jeremy Szteiter: many more than this, in fact, that have been referring to the state of critical thinking, or what it means to our development as a social social world. So there are a couple of examples of headlines here that might show you the the range of ways that we're
Jeremy Szteiter: we're getting told about what's happening with critical thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: Alright.
Jeremy Szteiter: So part of my teaching also involves supporting students through research and writing projects. As I believe I mentioned. So they're spending a lot of time having to understand information that's being shared through scholarly and popular sources, discerning one from the other. So the examples that I'm going to be talking through today. Keep that in perspective where we're
Jeremy Szteiter: having to take in information across sources, makes sense of it.
Jeremy Szteiter: reach clarity around your own ideas, understand what you think. Given all that you've seen out there, and make sense of things that you can do your own reasoning.
Jeremy Szteiter: So when I talk about critical thinking tools are referring more in terms terms of the structured ways of getting to focus your own thinking or others to go from one place to another as you navigate this information and then be organized in your mental management and mental process.
Jeremy Szteiter: I'm talking not so much about technical tools or critical thinking or apps that you might use, for example, to aid the reasoning process or help you develop questions or something. I'm thinking more about what you're what you're doing with your own mind, your own sense of your own mind, and your own mental direction.
Jeremy Szteiter: as you're oriented in your your approaches.
Jeremy Szteiter: I think I'm also thinking a little bit outside of, or maybe beyond information. Literacy itself, too, in terms of knowing the source, knowing the trustworthiness of the source and what the source's motivations are
Jeremy Szteiter: for providing whatever information they're providing, you know, to you.
So our focus here is more on the structured ways of
Jeremy Szteiter: starting to bring the principles of critical thinking into direct practice
Jeremy Szteiter: when you encounter content and what that looks like? and then our examples will also give everyone hopefully a brief chance to experiment a little bit on the spot, as you think through how that works in your in your own mind.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the the definition provided here on the slide is one common one from Robert Ennis.
Jeremy Szteiter: Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking, focused on deciding what to do or what to believe. So you say, great. Okay, that's that seems fine. When you start to look at the that in terms of the components of what it actually means
Jeremy Szteiter: there could be many different angles of
Jeremy Szteiter: how do we get to that that ideal?
Jeremy Szteiter: so there's the level of identifying assumptions, analyzing and making judgments about things, discerning characteristics.
Jeremy Szteiter: of ideas, drawing upon previous knowledge.
Jeremy Szteiter: meta cognition. So thinking about your own thinking, forming effective questions
Jeremy Szteiter: and recognizing fallacious arguments.
Jeremy Szteiter: So all those things could be part of that idea of reasonable getting to the reasonable of thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: There are also a few different metaphors for critical thinking that I also think are are useful to hold in mind. So I'll mention these, and then we'll start to get into the examples. But one of the metaphors is that critical thinking is holding alternatives in tension.
Jeremy Szteiter: So this refers to the idea that the mental effort that it takes to have alternative ideas in mind.
Jeremy Szteiter: and not simply seen as
Jeremy Szteiter: not seem simply seeing one idea is stronger than the other, but seeing both of them as informing something about the other. so keeping the tension there, meaning not letting one idea, even if you feel like it's the best one, automatically dominate and
Jeremy Szteiter: completely
Jeremy Szteiter: sort of cover over other ideas that maybe are not quite as good. So the holding intention is sort of an effortful act that you make to at least keep possibilities in mind to be open-minded.
Jeremy Szteiter: Another metaphor is this, one of Bell offer uses the pursuit of uncertainty.
Jeremy Szteiter: which I think is is in some ways counterintuitive to what a lot of people think about when they think about critical thinking. Maybe initially.
Jeremy Szteiter: So, we might think about critical thinking as the force that gets us to really understand which evidence or facts or ideas are the strong ones.
Jeremy Szteiter: Bring those forward and then get to the solution. Get to solving the problem, the right answer, the right decision, the best outcome.
Jeremy Szteiter: But what if we shift that emphasis instead to seeing the goal of critical critical thinking as discovering the place where there is uncertainty.
Jeremy Szteiter: and then distancing your mind from the idea that you need to overcome that uncertainty immediately.
Jeremy Szteiter: maybe in practical terms, you eventually do need to get to the solution.
Jeremy Szteiter: But maybe there's another way of thinking about it where you actively can stay in this place of curiosity, of being uncertain of seeing that there are gaps for things that are
Jeremy Szteiter: not knowable or unknowable. We're very hard to know. And what if we pay pay attention to what those are before we start to jump toward answers.
Jeremy Szteiter: So for the structures that I'm going to mention, I suggest to people that they work better when used very deliberately.
Jeremy Szteiter: so it might be informative to just sort of sit and listen and take them in intellectually. Keep them in mind. But I think that they're actually better used when they're applied with some degree of discipline and really treated as something to try repeatedly through deliberate periodic practice. So I think that they're they're typically easy to understand intuitively. But people.
Jeremy Szteiter: I think, rarely just will.
Jeremy Szteiter: They'll they'll rarely do them sort of deliberately and with intention.
Jeremy Szteiter: and not automatically unless they get some additional motivation.
Jeremy Szteiter: So I think there can be some some challenging aspects to of this when we talk about bringing critical thinking tools into our
Jeremy Szteiter: processes of managing our content. They.
Jeremy Szteiter: They can seem to slow things down. They can seem to lengthen the time that you take to complete a task
Jeremy Szteiter: there can be some resistance to using critical thinking deliberately, because they, it seems like, well, I know this is talking about. So I can just get to the answer quickly. But I'll show you a few examples as far as how we can
Jeremy Szteiter: get to some ideas in in a short session like this. and bring critical thinking into some some practice.
Jeremy Szteiter: alright. So the first
Jeremy Szteiter: tool that I'll mention is this one that we'll call metacognitive goal setting. It's a way to turn your conscious mind to the way that you are thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: and that's a concept that not maybe, is not obvious to everyone immediately.
Jeremy Szteiter: It provides a way for you to give some attention to how you're thinking. with the idea that there's not only one way to think. There maybe are many ways to think, and in a given moment
Jeremy Szteiter: maybe you are using one of those ways and not others. So how are you thinking during during a specific period of time? The idea of metacognition refers to
Jeremy Szteiter: being aware of how you think, and in that awareness, being able to make intentional choices about goals or commitments that you're making as you encounter your information.
Jeremy Szteiter: So just as a way of orienting us here, it's used as kind of a high level guidance system for your overall process when you're entering some
Jeremy Szteiter: new kind of task. Maybe a research project, maybe a problem solving task. Maybe a literature search, for example.
Jeremy Szteiter: and the basic processes that you take some time before you start and really reflect and identify the goals, not only about the outcome, but about how you commit to thinking during this period of time.
Jeremy Szteiter: So when you reflect on which kind of thinking you're going to be doing you choose a goal.
Jeremy Szteiter: you make a commitment to it.
Jeremy Szteiter: You continue to check into that goal throughout the process whatever length of time that means, and then you review at the end.
Jeremy Szteiter: So here what we sometimes call, you know, thinking about the habits of mind, of critical thinking can be thought of as part of those calls. I'll offer to you. What if for the rest of this session today, I ask you, what if I asked you to commit to a Meta cognitive call.
Jeremy Szteiter: So I'll give you the following list on the next screen.
Jeremy Szteiter: and these are just some examples.
Jeremy Szteiter: But I'll ask you to take a minute and read through, and just for the sake of trying it out. Choose any one of the numbered items that speaks to you.
Jeremy Szteiter: and one that you feel like you'd like to work on. And as I continue with my presentation, see if you can
Jeremy Szteiter: somehow consciously keep a bit of it in the in the front of your mind, seeing it. See if you can hold onto it long enough so that you remember it as we go on.
Jeremy Szteiter: So go ahead and read for that
Jeremy Szteiter: alright. So I'll move on hopefully. You've gotten a chance to just browse those statements and find one that maybe you feel like is something that you like to work on. And again, the the role here of the statements is that you're keeping it in mind as a Cole you're trying to achieve some kind of mental
Jeremy Szteiter: perspective management orientation that maybe is not within your natural habits. So when you recognize this, and you pay attention to the goal. Then there's a way of setting up your mind to be maybe ready, maybe more open to using critical thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: good practice in this, in a sense, as you go on with whatever activity activity is that you're doing
Jeremy Szteiter: alright. So, and then the challenge is, if you have noted which goal you chose.
Jeremy Szteiter: Can you check back on it every once in a while, every few minutes, or every once in a while, during our talk and notice. Are you doing it
Jeremy Szteiter: for one? And is there a way that you can allow yourself to do it?
Jeremy Szteiter: So we'll go on to another example.
Jeremy Szteiter: So another critical thinking kind of practice is one that we are calling methodological, methodological, believing, and doubting.
So this approach is I described by
Jeremy Szteiter: Researcher Peter elbow professor who is at University of Massachusetts at hand.
Jeremy Szteiter: and Amherst. and the premise of his idea is that in the in the normal discourse of critical thinking. We place a lot of emphasis on the process of doubting.
Jeremy Szteiter: because our sensibility and critical thinking is often about
Jeremy Szteiter: protecting ourselves from bad ideas, or from being manipulated by other people who maybe we think don't have our best interest in mind. So our critical thinking is often about. Let's make sure that the bad ideas are
Jeremy Szteiter: squashed
Jeremy Szteiter: so that they cannot invade and sort of confuse us and get us get us stuck.
Jeremy Szteiter: Excuse me. So the idea of methodological believing, doubting refers to way to restore the balance between those 2 modes of thinking.
Jeremy Szteiter: so that we can get something out of both of them.
Jeremy Szteiter: And this leads us to maybe a better sense of open mindedness that allows us to hold that tension between competing ideas and then learn from them
equally well.
Jeremy Szteiter: And the basic idea is that when something is presented to us, something that maybe is a subjective kind of piece of content.
Jeremy Szteiter: we we might go into a naturally inclined to believe it or disbelieve it right away.
Jeremy Szteiter: and if we go into it with that in mind, then we're probably going to confirm our our way of thinking as we read through, or we might confirm it, or we might look for ways to confirm.
So
Jeremy Szteiter: the process here gives us fair time to do both believing and disbelieving or doubting within one piece of content that might normally sway us one way or another.
Jeremy Szteiter: So it's used when you're used to dealing with text
Jeremy Szteiter: that again presents a subject subjective point of view.
Jeremy Szteiter: So it mentions that some examples could be an editorial. Probably most things that are short, shared on social media is individual private posts.
Jeremy Szteiter: and also things like the interpretation or discussion section of a scholarly paper. So things that present a point of view, and maybe are not, can be seen as not purely facts, but somebody's way of of making sense of whatever the facts on.
Jeremy Szteiter: Excuse me again.
Jeremy Szteiter: Alright, so I'll give everybody a chance to do an example. I'm going to put a link in the chat.
Jeremy Szteiter: Alright. So the link is in the chat, and also the one that's on the screen. They're the same link. And I'm gonna give give everyone a chance to try this.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the process is is that you review the text? We're looking at. Example number number 2 here. So if you go to the the link and go to the Google document under the link.
Jeremy Szteiter: There's some examples. So the little example 2.
Jeremy Szteiter: Then there's a passage there that I'm going to ask you to read twice. So the key here is that once you're applying
Jeremy Szteiter: the believing mode of thinking, you're trying to get your mind really set that you are going to believe you are committed to believing what's said.
Jeremy Szteiter: and then you're going to read it a second time that time committed to the doubting mode.
Jeremy Szteiter: So you're really committed to doubting what's being said during that period.
Jeremy Szteiter: and the idea is that you're not mixing these 2 within one. Read, you're reading it once in one mode. stopping, resetting your mind and then reading it another time, and in the other mode, and see what you gain from that experience.
Jeremy Szteiter: The idea is that with believing in doubting you can see value in either way. You can see value and believing. If you believe you can see the value from what's being said, when you doubt as well, even if you personally have a very strong point of view one way or the other.
Jeremy Szteiter: So we're really just experimenting here the example text is a reprint of an essay from the New York Times student editorial contest from 2,023, and the issue at stake in this editorial is not necessarily one that's, I think, very highly charged or polar polarizing in in our current
Jeremy Szteiter: context. So maybe that helps the example. If it's not something that you normally have been thinking about much lately. But I'm gonna leave about a full 5 min, 5 to 6 min for you to read the passage once, then twice
Jeremy Szteiter: again, each time taking on either a strong, believing
Jeremy Szteiter: disposition or strong doubting disposition. And then we'll come back and real love.
Jeremy Szteiter: Talk a little bit more and move on from there. So right now I will just be quiet for about 5 min.
Jeremy Szteiter: Let's continue in one more minute.
Jeremy Szteiter: Okay, why don't we continue?
Jeremy Szteiter: All right? So this idea of the methodological and the believing and doubting means that
Jeremy Szteiter: you're applying it as a method. This can take practice, but I think it's it's it can be a very powerful one, because, as you're looking at things, if if you're if you're doubting if you're going through the
Jeremy Szteiter: passage with the doubting mind or with the believing mind, the question that comes up is, you know, what are the implications of doubting or believing what's being said.
Jeremy Szteiter: So by going through these different modes, it potentially gives you a chance to regard ideas that you may have been overlooking or thought about a while ago, and decided you already understand it already. But then you maybe get to revisit it again here.
Jeremy Szteiter: So things that might seem obvious to you. You review those again, maybe with a little bit of a closer scrutiny about your own beliefs and the reasons for your beliefs, and you start to bring that all up to the surface.
Jeremy Szteiter: So consequence of using this kind of tools is that you raise the possibility in your own mind about where you might be thinking differently, or where you might be. Applying your mental orientation differently. But you also have a way to articulate it and potentially talking with other people and have a shared experience as well.
Jeremy Szteiter: So all these things are used to kind of help build that idea of
Jeremy Szteiter: building your own critical thinking, but also supporting others and getting people to expand how they take in this kind of content.
Jeremy Szteiter: let me go on to another example.
Jeremy Szteiter: So another way to think about where critical thinking happens is in this kind of thinking about regarding content is to focus at the level of language.
Jeremy Szteiter: So there are a lot of critical thinking resources that help point us toward. How do we think about words and language? How do we regard the written word especially when we don't have a direct or immediate way to talk back to the person who wrote the words.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the tool is then, to use critical thinking, oriented prompts that help us to pay attention to the language and stay with it longer than we might normally do.
Jeremy Szteiter: So when you're doing a close reading of text, and you want to understand the assumptions that are being made within the text. See that the phrasing of statement often means that there might not be a single fixed meaning of those words.
Jeremy Szteiter: That is obvious at first. and when you want to develop some understanding of something that's ambiguous or questionable or hard to understand.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the processes that you review the text, you look at things from the level of words and phrases, and sometimes longer passages, and look at things from this closer point view.
Jeremy Szteiter: So here I will direct everybody to look at. Example 3. Again in the link that I provided previously in the chat. It's also there on the screen.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the example here is to try this idea of a close reading and looking specifically at looking for assumptions, at the level of words and at the level of sentences, at least just to try it out. For now.
Jeremy Szteiter: When you're thinking about emphasis on words, thinking about how the use of words leads us to make assumptions.
Jeremy Szteiter: understand what things mean, understand concepts and constructs and form an image about something. Even though that image might be based on things that are also not said or not part of the words that we're looking at.
So in the activity. What I'll suggest that you do is to just kind of look through
Jeremy Szteiter: the items that are labeled for the word and phrase level, and then the passage level, and just see if you can. Look carefully, read slowly, look closely at your words and the phrases, and start to notice what assumptions are you making, and what are the implications for those assumptions? What do you?
Jeremy Szteiter: What's what's the so what of it?
Jeremy Szteiter: If you have a belief about what certain words or phrases mean. Again, this is example number 3
Jeremy Szteiter: in the Google sheet. And again, we'll leave a few minutes just to to let you look it over and make sense of it for yourself.
Jeremy Szteiter: We'll continue in one more minute.
Jeremy Szteiter: Okay, let's continue again.
Jeremy Szteiter: I know that we're moving quickly. So one of the the ideas here just to public come forward is that when we're
Jeremy Szteiter: when we're making statements, when we're reading. when we're looking at text. There are frequently embedded assumptions that are present in
Jeremy Szteiter: the use of words and language. And when we're doing this close examination, slowing down our reading.
Jeremy Szteiter: at least for certain parts.
Jeremy Szteiter: focusing on passages in some very narrow way, can help us to develop this practice of giving us the chance to recognize our assumptions, test them, and be more natural at doing that as we read
Jeremy Szteiter: bigger, bigger passages or bigger sets of content.
Jeremy Szteiter: I'll offer one more example in the interest of our
Jeremy Szteiter: shorting time.
Jeremy Szteiter: So one of the principles of good critical thinking, too, is that when there are issues with multiple sides or perspectives, or when one idea seems to be accepted as the common knowledge.
Jeremy Szteiter: But you want to acknowledge the minority view. You often need to actively seek out some of those perspectives because they're not as visible as quickly. So
Jeremy Szteiter: the challenge is kind of what we might commonly commonly think about is confirmation bias. When we look from information that confirms what we already know.
Jeremy Szteiter: we just become. And further, embedded in our bias because we find a lot of that information that's already supporting us.
Jeremy Szteiter: So we don't feel like we have to justify seeking out alternatives. So the critical thinking step is to recognize that that's happening.
Jeremy Szteiter: and to make the effortful act of trying to make the minority idea more visible.
Jeremy Szteiter: So I think this relates to to the believing and doubting as well.
Jeremy Szteiter: and this is what I meant before. But I talked about both critical thinking skills and habits when you have the skill to look for alternatives. But you also have to know when it's time to do so and be able to do that which sometimes is, is challenging. Given how comfortable or familiar you are with certain kinds of content.
Jeremy Szteiter: So when you you might use this when you're looking to explore topic, and when you feel like there's a sort of a dominant idea coming forward. But you realize that more is out there that is not
Jeremy Szteiter: quite as as obvious.
Jeremy Szteiter: so I'll give everyone a chance again to go through the example.
Jeremy Szteiter: If you look at the link again, the Google document, look at example number 4. So the process is to try this in the context of searching for information on the web.
and the idea is that you search for the topic as you normally would
Jeremy Szteiter: notice the results. But then also take a look at the sources and the the information that the information that you're seeing.
Jeremy Szteiter: and then repeat the search, using keywords that help you find the alternatives and make those come forward.
Jeremy Szteiter: And when you look at the results, notice the sources again, and if there are any differences, so the example kind of walks you through a couple of possibilities for how you might search for something and then append keywords to the searches, to find the alternatives, or find other points of view that are not
Jeremy Szteiter: is is readily re readily developed.
Jeremy Szteiter: So again, I'll give you a couple of minutes just to try and experiment with searching on your own on the web, and we'll come back, and you'll
Jeremy Szteiter: finish from there.
Jeremy Szteiter: One more minute.
Jeremy Szteiter: Alright, so let's come back together. We'll finish up here. So these examples are just providing, I think, some some ways of infusing critical thinking at this level of
Jeremy Szteiter: engaging with content that works across the disciplinary interests.
Jeremy Szteiter: as my sort of with the final slide is. Oh, let's check back on that metacognitive goal that you committed to at the beginning of the session. So as you're looking at whichever goal you might have identified.
Jeremy Szteiter: the question here would be, did you follow that goal? Did you apply it? Where were you able to remember and keep it in mind and keep it? Keep it in the front of your consciousness.
Jeremy Szteiter: and then you might use that to decide whether or not you need to repeat your goal, repeat your commitment
Jeremy Szteiter: again.
Jeremy Szteiter: and how you might build in more naturally other way to use this other kind of thinking
Jeremy Szteiter: alright. I do. I know I did move pretty quickly. We covered a number of items.
Jeremy Szteiter: but I do want to stop and see if there are questions or other comments that I can
Jeremy Szteiter: respond to.
Julie Edwards: Yes, thank you so much.
Julie Edwards: We have had some questions. Come in, please go ahead and add more if you have them to the Q. And a. But we'll jump right in. Someone says it's clear that this methodology encourages looking at an issue from various perspectives. How do we know and help others see when it's time to take a position on an issue? And how do we best communicate our reasoning for doing so.
Jeremy Szteiter: Yeah, I'll take a moment. Just just let that sink in.
Jeremy Szteiter: I think that this this kind of stretches some of the things that we do in the critical thinking program to beyond this idea of engaging with content. And what do we do in terms of the social environment. How do we create environments where people will think critically together? So one of our our students, common kinds of challenges is.
Jeremy Szteiter: I'm working with these people who. I don't think they're critical thinkers, and I can't get them to you know, sort of be reasonable in their discussion with me about something, or I'm trying to get other people encourage them to be critical thinkers as well.
Jeremy Szteiter: So I think one thing that we think about is, how do we first of all model it in ourselves.
Jeremy Szteiter: So there are elements here of not only reading text, but good listening to people for people the methodological, believing, and doubting is something that you might apply in a conversation as well as with text.
Jeremy Szteiter: and you might think about it, you know, sort of the believing and doubting. helping you to develop empathy for a person that you're listening to. So
Jeremy Szteiter: I think it's it's all about building the environment supporting people to create the culture and I think modeling it for yourself is the way to start from what I can tell. So, modeling it as far as what you are doing and showing. That's the that's the sort of the form of discourse you you appreciate.
Jeremy Szteiter: But it's a hard question, because we're also thinking about.
Jeremy Szteiter: What do we do about those people out there who are not thinking critically, or we feel like our not open minded not taking in other perspectives.
Jeremy Szteiter: And I don't know if there's a quick answer to. you know, magically make that change. But
Jeremy Szteiter: we think a lot about this sort of I call the indirect approach to critical thinking. you can teach people how to think critically with some of these tools if you have that forum to do so. But how do you set things up so that their natural inclination to think critically is is valued and honored?
Julie Edwards: Yeah. And I would encourage any of you in the to drop in the chat any thoughts that you have about how you would advise. Maybe a student on taking a position and communicating their reasoning for taking that position. It's a great question
Julie Edwards: you mentioned earlier, a way at the beginning. AI, can you talk to us a little bit about your thoughts on
Julie Edwards: how AI might influence or change critical thinking, or what will have to be
Julie Edwards: critically thinking about.
Jeremy Szteiter: Sure.
Jeremy Szteiter: yeah, that's such a discussion right now. And I'm I've been thinking about that question as well. So II think that for me, one of the the ways that AI let's if we, if we think about chat gpt, for example.
Jeremy Szteiter: chat G. Ppt is sort of an aid in our research or writing process. I've encountered people who've been trying to use Chat Gtp as sort of a conversational guide. So, in other words, it's kind of like treating Chat gpt as if it's the other person in the room that you don't really have, but you can draw upon to help you identify
Jeremy Szteiter: what is happening in your own thinking.
So?
Jeremy Szteiter: You might. You might think about AI as maybe helping us to
Jeremy Szteiter: engage in sort of pseudo conversations that in some sense are not real. They're not human conversations, but they do
Jeremy Szteiter: bring us in touch with ideas that are not our own. So, using AI to ask about the alternatives, or to get AI to seek out. what does what do other people say about this idea? When I have this way of thinking about it? I feel like that could be a possibility or a way to use the tool.
Jeremy Szteiter: I know there are broader implications of your question, too.
Jeremy Szteiter: Julie. Saul, we'll keep thinking about it.
Julie Edwards: That's great. Thank you? Someone was asking, and II think you covered this throughout the presentation with these examples. But suggestions on improving our own critical thinking muscle before teaching others to accomplish it. So maybe going back to that deliberative, deliberate practice, how do you recommend?
Julie Edwards: We build those muscles ourselves. deliberately using these tools or any other suggestions.
Jeremy Szteiter: Yeah, I think that the interesting thing is that I usually think about the importance of the social environment
Jeremy Szteiter: in doing so, so, I think, making the the fact that you're making a commitment to build that muscle. That muscle more visible to others, and being accountable, is sometimes helpful to people. So I think, as far as how you do it. There are many ways or many sort of micro
Jeremy Szteiter: processes that I feel like you could adapt and use, and trying to treat consistently in your own work.
Jeremy Szteiter: But I think that the muscle gets built when you commit to it. When you share that with other people when they're doing the same thing, and when you're actually having some kind of
Jeremy Szteiter: formal or maybe not formal but systematic process of returning to your commitments and saying, Here's what I've been doing
Jeremy Szteiter: in our program. Students do things like they keep logs. They keep journals, they do reflective writing. There's a lot of emphasis on reflective practice. So it's it's like you have to carve out and set aside time and
Jeremy Szteiter: be accountable. Commit to it. And then, like, we said, share what you're doing within a community.
Jeremy Szteiter: So the how is kind of happening different ways? I think, across those levels.
Julie Edwards: that's great. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: This is a great question. And one that I think a lot of us will resonate with, who have worked with students. This person saying, I find the practice of questioning everything or verifying every viewpoint can be exhausting. Do you have suggestions for establishing some known truths for yourself to build a foundation? Or do you think that practice would fly in the face of critical thinking? So I we hear from students a lot. Well, I can't believe anything right, like everything is just
Julie Edwards: I don't believe anything that I find online.
Jeremy Szteiter: So I think that's what this is getting to. Yep.
Jeremy Szteiter: yeah, II love that question. And that's it's one of those hard questions of critical thinking, too. So I think,
Jeremy Szteiter: maybe within, that is the idea of, can we? Can we accept any truth is anything, or, you know, is anything fixed as anything sort of not relative
Jeremy Szteiter: And I think that's challenging to think about that relativity thing about well, if it's it's true for you, it's true. If it's not true for you, it's not. And that's all. Okay.
Jeremy Szteiter: So
Jeremy Szteiter: yeah, I'm starting to kind of spin. Spin my wheels around that question a little bit.
But I think I'm thinking about
Jeremy Szteiter: this idea of maybe again, instead of focusing on the truth or what is true? work with students to focus on forming the good questions, what are the good questions that you need to be asking? What are the unanswerable questions about this topic?
Jeremy Szteiter: what are questions that you cannot type into a web search and have the web search answered, and you get something out of it.
Jeremy Szteiter: So help students develop better questions, ask the right questions and make that sort of the center of their thinking about what what is
Jeremy Szteiter: and that's maybe why my idea about the pursuit of uncertainty
Jeremy Szteiter: is another perspective that's helpful here. So you're finding what it is that we don't know, and if you know that if you understand that, then
Jeremy Szteiter: I don't know, start there and see if you can
Jeremy Szteiter: can get your anchor into some other other ideas from that
Julie Edwards: I love that. That's a fantastic, great question. Great answer. That brings us right up to the top of the hour, Jeremy, I would like to thank you so much for sharing this presentation and these examples with us. Someone wrote in the chat, I was expecting just to sit back and listen, and I was really enriched by the thinking exercises.
Jeremy Szteiter: Thank you so much. very much. Appreciate your time.
Julie Edwards: Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. I will be sending out this recording the slides, the chat and audio Transcript. In a few days all of that will be available on our blog, and you'll get an email from me as soon as that is ready. Thank you again. So much for joining us. I hope to see you all at the next webinar. Until then have a great day.